Short Story: Loop de Loop
One of the biggest things I wish to achieve with the use of this blog, and my twice a week short stories, is a sense of continuity. I want each story to be a unique glimpse into the universe I envision, while still telling a cohesive story. It’s an amazing exercise for me to learn better writing habits, and a great chance for my readers to get to know me as an author and watch as I continue to learn and grow. It’s a fun relationship, and one which has me bouncing out of bed each morning excited for what the day may bring.
Boisterousness aside, today I want to take the chance to develop a concept that I’ve been kicking around for years now.: The Loop. It’s an oft alluded to item in a lot of science fiction, the concept of a separate dimension, or form of travel, which allows for trips made far faster than the speed of light without breaking the laws of relativity. There are a lot of great examples of this across several wonderful novels, but I like the methodology I’ve developed. In a sense, The Loop is a fixed feature, created by gravitational forces condensing real space until it folds slightly. Not to be confused with wormhole science fiction (Interstellar, Stargate), it’s more a separate phase of reality, a layer of existence “beneath” our own, caused by the immeasurable forces of gravity as they warp the very fabric of space and time. As such, these pocket dimension “railways” act as a sort of fixed method of faster than light travel within the Milky Way.
Having The Loop function in such a fashion allows for several things. With fixed points, The Loop becomes a competitive resource. Certain “docks”, or places where the gravitic anomalies which created The Loop allow access into it, will always be more prized than others. Our limited views into the nearly infinite depths of the Milky Way have yielded plenty of Earth-like worlds, but they would still be highly prized, and any dock which connected to a solar system containing a Goldilocks planet would be jealously guarded by any space-faring race which lives within our own ecological tolerance ranges.
Enter the protagonist aliens, which I have yet to fully finalize in my mind. I have lots of ideas as to their physiology and social fabric. I’m leaning more towards a feline human hybrid, akin to the Kilrathi of Wing Commander. I’ll have to change a lot of things, because I don’t want to simply become derivative or worse commit outright plagiarism, but feline human hybrids have been a mainstay of my fantasy and sci-fi imaginings, and I’m far from alone in that. Most recently in my mind springs Jim Butcher and the Aeronaut’s Windlass. His realization of anthropomorphism with the Cats of that world are amazing. Again, I can’t let myself fall into a simple trap with copying others. The best ideas will always be our own.
Without further ado…
Loop de Loop
Humanity had reached a dead end. Successive generations of ionic propulsion had created dependable solar system travel. Earth to the Mars Colonies was a travel time of ten days, Earth to the various Moon bases was a matter of hours. Mining in the Near Earth Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt had been going on for as long as anyone could remember, not to mention the various colonies, bases, and mining operations which occurred on virtually every surface humanity could land on, and some we couldn’t. Eventually though, when the planetoid Pluto was within humanities grasp, we realized the awful truth: We were trapped.
No matter how many iterations of the ion drive, and various other less successful propulsion systems, were dreamed up we still couldn’t outrun relativity. Faster than light was not possible. The last probe to the Alpha Centauri hadn’t been heard from in nearly 40 years, presumed lost or destroyed. Another had never been sent. It was a nut we couldn’t crack, and it was beginning to have an impact. We couldn’t stay in the Sol system forever. At the rate we were consuming the available resources, we had a few hundred years at most before we were in serious trouble. Given how much pain and destruction were required to even make it out of Earth’s atmosphere on a permanent basis, no one was optimistic about our future. We worked, we saved, we dreamed our dreams of wealth and love as we always did, but behind it all was a tinge of desperation. We had done it! We were among the stars, no longer tied down to our miracle of a planet which gave birth to us. And yet…
As we passed the time and became more desperate to find the answer, humanity was given the most amazing gift it had ever received. Greater than NASA, which had birthed the first generation of our precious Ion Drives. Greater than the Hernandez family, whose foresight and vision produced the first moon colonies. Humanities biggest contributor was a young girl. A member of the Islamic Fellowship of Mars colony, our heroine was born to an unremarkable family of miners. She received no special education, was not a shining star of her school, and gave no sign that she would become the most important figure in our history, bar none. All she had was a fascination with a singular subject: gravity. In studying the great masters, she began to see as they did. She never spoke of her passion, instead studying on her own, quietly over the years of her young life. Ad’ifaah Khalil could never have known that what she would stumble upon as she took her quiet notes and wrote down her thoughts and speculations of the heavens above would forever alter the course of humanity.
To this day, hundreds of years after the fact, theories still exist in many scientific academies that if the events of May 17th, 2275 had never happened, humanity would have never left Sol. For good or ill, happen they did. An orbiting landing platform which operated as an intermediary for shipped goods for the Mars colonies suffered catastrophic engine failure. No records remained from the landing platform, and we have only a few eye witness accounts of the event as it happened. When a reactor goes critical, there aren’t a lot of survivors. A colony on a plant barren of water and other necessary daily requirements for the sustaining of a population has a steady stream of cargo haulers heading to and from it with the regularity of a metronome. When a supernova erupted in the heavens a few miles above the colony domes, no cargo hauler in the solar system could have stood up to such brutal force.
Tossed about like dolls in the hands of an angry toddler, 17 of the 23 full time cargo haulers owned by The Islamic Fellowship were thrown towards the surface by system failure or the sheer force of the platform’s destruction. They were thrown directly at the defenseless colony below, which was screened only by the simple energy barriers all colonies had which prevented minor debris from causing damage. Each hauler impact was devastating, any single one enough to cripple the colony. Taken together, there was hardly anything left. The ruins are preserved as a relic of humanity’s past, and the sight of it chills the blood. It is what most of humanity imagines when they think of armageddon: the twisted and ruined wreckage of what were Ad’ifaah’s and the other colonists final moments.
When the Mars Emergency Response Teams arrived at the site of the disaster, there was hardly anyone to save. With no shields to speak of and no warning, the colony had become a tomb. 6,738 souls resided in the shelter of the colonies domes, and almost 400 men and women had worked on the platforms and the haulers. Of those numbers, 37 survived long enough to be rescued, 11 lived through their injuries. Slower to arrive were the scientific teams which attempted to figure out what had gone so wrong, in the hopes it could be prevented from ever happening again. One of the scientific workers was a man by the name of Lawrence Kilgore, and it was he who found the works of Ad’ifaah’s heart and soul. In sorting through the wreckage of her families living quarters, he found the book amongst the strewn detritus. The calculations of gravity upon an open page were what caught his eye, as he had studied gravity during his training to become a disaster specialist. He knew all of the relevant calculations, as they had been stagnant for such a long time. These equations were like nothing he had ever seen before.
His curiosity and knowledge were what gave the world Mrs Khalil’s work. She had discovered that as major bodies generated gravity, there were intersections where gravity ground together and part of it disappeared. Nothing could account for this anomaly, unless the energies were being forced together much like the tectonic plates on Earth. So where was the shunted energy going? Her calculations were a theory, a new direction for science to explore, an idea never before given life: What if these highly predictable gravitic events were all connected? What if they lead to a different reality from our own, created by the impossible forces of colliding gravity? A few years after the loss of The Islamic Fellowship colony, scientists discovered the first dock on The Loop, exactly where Ad’ifaah had predicted it would be. A means of crossing the barriers between our reality and Ad’ifaah’s anomaly was discovered shortly thereafter, spurred on by her astonishing insight and terrible fate.
The day the barrier was broken is known as the birth of the Second Renaissance. It’s one of humanities most sacred days, one which is celebrated on every planet of the vast web connecting humanity to our birthplace. It is a day of remembrance for the prices paid by so many as The Loop was explored, as colonists set out along it to settle on new lands, and the loss of the gifted young woman who had made it all possible. In her honor, it was called Khalil’s Respite. Our highest awards in science and civic duty in the United Planets of Humanity are all named for Ad’ifaah and the other scientists who freed humanity to explore the vastness of the Milky Way without limit.
You see, The Loop was a separate reality from our own. Consisting of a serious of tube-like lengths, crisscrossing across the Milky Way, connecting one Solar System to another. On it’s own, that would be exceptional but not revolutionary. But you see, Einstein in all his genius could not have predicted how such tightly compacted forces would work. Relativity was no barrier within The Loop. Ships traveling at the fastest speed ion drives could muster were capable of reaching the nearest connected Solar System in a matter of weeks. Propelled along in such rapid fashion, the reach of humanity expanded at a rate faster than even the most optimistic among us could have predicted. Our abilities and knowledge gained fastening a structure fit for habitation to any surface which could hold it meant that any system, no matter how hostile, was open to our collective ingenuity. With the connectivity of The Loop, goods could move backwards and forwards along it with great speed, allowing for vital supplies to flow to those colonies which needed them, and from those colonies which generated them to yet more along The Loop’s length.
We discovered new elements previously denied to us in the Sol system. Some, present in as much abundance as carbon throughout the Loop Systems, became the basic building blocks for the next generation of starships. Almost ten times as strong and durable as the hardest synthesized carbon based materials, the weight limits alone allowed for even more fantastic optimization and customization of ship design. Limited only by our imagination, these new ships took on every shape conceivable to fit each new challenge as it was presented. We had received our wish: humanity was no longer bound to quiet despair as we lived our lives. Space, in all it’s infinite majesty, was beckoning to humanity with endless promise.
As with poor Ad’ifaah, however, these times endured far too briefly and ended with tragic destruction of innocents, for we found that we were not alone in the Universe, not alone at all.
To be continued…
